Re: <nettime> gentrification of hacking

[Florian Cramer <fcramer@pleintekst.nl>]

   When Stephen Levy wrote "Hackers" in 1984, his description of hacker
   culture and his write-up of the hacker ethic were, to a considerable
   part, based on Richard Stallman. Already in that year, Levy called
   Stallman the "last of the true hackers". Stallman created the GNU
   Project in the same year out of frustration of what had become - or how
   little had remained - of the original M.I.T. hacker culture. Even the
   GNU Project itself involves "gentrification" in the sense that
   development of some of its subprojects (such as the GNU C Compiler, the
   GNU C Library and the GNOME desktop) has become largely corporate. GNU
   intentionally never imposed prohibitions on commercial and particular
   political/military uses of software licensed under its terms. This
   position continues to be criticized by other hackers, for example by
   Felix von Leitner from Chaos Computer Club.
   All this suggests that the "gentrification of hacking" is not a new
   phenomenon, but that it has been a part of hacker culture since its
   early days.
   -F

   On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 7:57 PM, John Hopkins
   <[1]jhopkins@neoscenes.net> wrote:

     Biella --
     some musings on your note:
 <...>


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